


2059

by mamie_eisenhower



Category: Political RPF - US 21st c.
Genre: Future Fic, Kid Fic, M/M, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:14:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28537905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mamie_eisenhower/pseuds/mamie_eisenhower
Summary: You never stop being a daughter, and never stop being a father.
Relationships: Chasten Buttigieg/Pete Buttigieg
Kudos: 25





	2059

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to "The Water Has Cooled". If you haven't read it: Pete is elected in 2020 and serves two terms. In the White House, they raise two adopted children, Marisól and Joseph.

**Tuesday, April 29, 2059**

**MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, New York City**

She was pretty sure he was pulling his presentation out of his ass at this very moment, and -- contrary to what he’d sworn _on the ashes of Le Corbusier_ , eyes widened and innocent -- had not done the reading. Still, Jason being Jason and thus ingenuous, his ideas weren’t without merit. She’d enjoy grilling him on the finer points of his assessments on AI later -- that is, if they still had the time. Other students had to give their pitches first. And Viola’s would be terribly minute, and take a terribly long time.

Surreptitiously, she took a look at the time. With the minute flick of her wrist, her StrapPhone lit up. Eleven twenty-five. Adelina’s teacher had finally confirmed their meeting tomorrow. Four missed vi-calls from Dad. 

“... so, in short, I wouldn’t have done it. And am pretty sure they wouldn’t have done it either if they had our methods of collecting mobility data.”

A fifth one ringing.

Fuck. She hated doing this. 

“So, guys -- it’s time for a five minute respo break. Well done, Jason. I’m hoping you can elaborate on some of your arguments on Ho Chi Minh City later, but for now, good job.”

Ignoring her grad students’ murmur as its tide swelled to conversational volume, she went for the door, already activating the call-back function, and settled into the small, cramped office behind the lecture hall. Dad picked up on the second ring. Her Lens was still calibrating, dissolving his video into flesh-colored squares, but his voice sounded distraught: “Thanks for finally calling back, love -- I’ve been trying to reach you all morning --”

“And I’ve been teaching a class to thirty-five hyper-caffeinated twenty-somethings all morning.” She immediately regretted how sharp she was sounding.

His image fell into focus, but continued to quiver; his hand had to be shaking. And was the skin under his eyes, illuminated with her miniature image, blotchy and tear-streaked? What was going on?

“Your Papa’s in the hospital, Marisól, dear. I just wanted to tell you.” 

She gasped, and let sharpness yield to barely suppressed panic. “What happened? Will he be okay? Do I need to come to South Bend?”

“Well -- he was fiddling with the AC, you know, resetting it -- those smart features keep getting in each other’s way -- and fell off the ladder.”

“Fell off the ladder? Is he alright?” Her students could definitely hear her. Didn’t matter.

“Broke his hip and femur, the X-ray showed. He’s in surgery now.”

“Where are you?” There were beige curtains she wouldn’t allow in any room of their house behind him.

“A private waiting room in the clinic. I rode with the ambulance.”

“I’m coming tonight. I can hold the rest of this week’s classes virtually. Tell him I love him when he wakes up. You, too, Daddy. And text me if you need anything from home.”

She’d ended the call and rubbed the moisture out of the corner of her eyes, damn the mascara on her knuckles, before she noticed Viola standing in the doorway. She was engrossed in thumbing the folder in her hand, pretending to not have heard the conversation. Marisól hadn’t realized the door’d been left open. With a sigh, she turned to her student, raising an eyebrow.

“Is the President okay?” Viola hesitantly piped up, and, when the awkwardness of the situation fully washed over her, added: “I’m sorry for the interruption, but I’m having trouble making the holographer access my cloud for the Rio models …"

Marisól stood up, ignored the see-sawing of her field of vision, and strode by her into the classroom. “The President will be fine. Would be even better if he and the First Gentleman weren’t so resistant to accepting some help.” She gave her a tight-lipped smile. “Not a word to the press, though. -- As for the holographer: the rendering might just lag. I keep sending memos to IT begging them to finally upgrade.”

***

Adelina disliked being pulled out of kindergarten in general, and out of story hour in particular, but was delighted she could give the little Buddy she'd made out of modeling clay to her grandfathers in person instead of just showing it to them over vi-call. Lately, she’s been fascinated with their time in the White House, asking to be shown clip after clip and to be told story after story. Marisól was not sure she’d impressed quite enough that it wasn’t good manners to brag about your Pop’s political career to your fellow kindergarteners, but now was as good a time as any to acquaint Del with their family history. 

When they were sitting in the waiting area of the Queens’ hyperloop and her pulse had settled below 90, she finally, through the mask, pressed a kiss to the crown of her daughter’s head. Del kept staring at an ad-screen promising no-headache data insurance. It featured a happy family, with a girl Del’s age, and a Mommy, and a Daddy, and a big brother. Still, when Marisól told her that she hoped that Del, too, would visit her old mother in the hospital one day, she cuddled into her mother’s side, pressing her scrawny frame against the vintage Vêtements coat Marisól had gifted herself for Christmas.

***

**That evening**

**South Bend Memorial Hospital**

The nurse with the purple braids had assured them the disorientation would fade within the next few hours, but for now, Peter was still drowsy, drifting in and out of sleep, snoring lightly. He didn’t look as if he were in pain. The sounds of the hospital floor, awhirr and abuzz, would have made Chasten drowsy, too, in spite of the plastic chair digging into his back, if he wasn’t still too agitated about the events of the day. 

They’d been lucky, really, in the health department, at least since his own cancer scare now, what, fifteen years ago. The dog kept them moving about. So did their grandkids, when they were visiting. And he wouldn’t go so far as to say he’d had a premonition about Peter falling — that, certainly not -- but lately, he’d noticed. 

He’d noticed the stoop of Peter’s shoulders. He’d noticed that now, his eyebrows were more white than gray, too, as his hair had been for years. Just last week, or the week before, when Peter’d been reading that Walter Cronkite biography, he’d chuckled at Cronkite’s famed advice for old men -- to “never trust a fart; never pass up a drink; never ignore an erection” --, but his chuckle had been a different one than it would have been five years ago. Last summer, the four of them, Peter and Mari and Joseph and him, had paid their last honors at Barack Obama’s funeral. He, too, had been a youthful president, once.

Peter’s mouth stood agape, stubbled jaw slack against his chest. Chasten smiled, and took his heavy, dry hand between his own, careful not to brush against his leg or hip, where they’d installed plates and screws and other old man gear. He was just about to nod off when his StrapPhone lit up: Marisól had gotten his and Peter’s stuff from their home. She and Del would be here in just a few minutes’ time. 

***

Impossibly, Del had grown at least an inch in the three weeks since they’d last seen her, even if she denied it, wearing her mother’s impish, gap-toothed smile as a hand-me-down. After giving Chasten a bear hug at waist height, she’d pestered Mel, their Secret Service woman, who was standing in the corridor. Now she was sitting on his lap and, it seemed, tracing the contours of his bald spot with her little fingers. Unabashedness about most matters -- another trait the Buttigieg women shared

Indeed, he smelled that Marisól, presently quizzing the poor nurse on the details of Peter’s operation and outlook, would soon unleash her harangue of I-told-you-sos upon them. Not entirely unjustifiably, he feared. In retrospect, letting Peter get the tall ladder and try to fix the AC on his own was preposterous -- even though he felt that the rush of boiling panic that shot through him when he heard the crash and Peter’s swearing was more than steep enough a price to pay. 

Apparently bored with the topography of his scalp, Del glided off his lap and began to rummage through her mother’s handbag on the chair next to his. “I almost forgot!” she chirped, vaguely in his direction, when she found what she was looking for: “Today in kindergarten, I made a little Buddy!” 

He looked at the amorphous, puggle-colored mass in her hand, and adjusted his glasses. A single, bulging eye. A blob with a good-natured swoop of toothpick-etching for a muzzle -- that was Buddy, risen. Marisól had told him about Del’s recent obsession with their White House years. It didn’t worry him too much. If they’d navigated Mari’s rebellious teenage years -- and Joey’s less rebellious ones -- having just recently moved out of the People’s House, they’d manage this, as well. If worse came to worst, they’d end up as a political dynasty that skipped a generation.

He yanked himself out of his meandering thoughts. “Del,” he said, “that is a true masterpiece. Pop’s gonna be so excited about it when he wakes up that he’ll forget all about his surgery.”

Del nodded self-importantly and put the figure on the nightstand. The clattering reverberated at the room’s bare walls. “If he wants, I can blow kisses. Momma always says: if they don’t help, they can’t hurt, too.” She threw him a sage gaze, and he felt his face split into what had to be his first real smile since that morning’s catastrophe, resisting his teacher’s urge to correct her grammar to savor the moment.

The soprano trill of her voice must have awoken Peter -- he stirred, grimaced, looked around the room, put a hand on Chasten’s thigh. Mari, senses sharp as ever, abandoned the poor nurse and strode over. Her tone was more mellow than Chasten might have reasonably expected, knowing full well that his daughter had inherited some of the difficulty his husband had experienced in younger years expressing his emotions: “Welcome to the world of the living, Papa. I’ll let you greet your grand-daughter before I shower you in I-told-you-sos.”

***

“Are you in pain?”

Peter smiled at him, a little weakly. He looked tired. “I’ll be alright. They pumped me full of painkillers. You” -- with practiced mischief, he plucked Chasten’s sleeve -- “are just going to pull double duty walking Russell for a while.”

Chasten flashed him a quick grin, then got serious. “You know, maybe Mari is right. Maybe we should look for … help. For the next few months, at least.”

Peter didn’t say anything, but regarded him with an expression that Chasten, forty-five years ago, might have thought inscrutable. Today he knew it meant his husband was checking, then double-checking, the ringing of his inner bell. He pushed on: “We’re getting old-old, darling.”

“You only called me ‘darling’ right now because it makes you sound even older.”

“Just playing my cards right.”

“You’re not even seventy.”

Chasten huffed at his brazenness. “I’ll be seventy two months from now. And you’re closer to eighty, love.”

“You didn’t have to put it like that,” Peter said, then acquiesced with a sigh, “Although, I guess, it is like that. I just suppose I don’t exactly love Marisól lecturing us on all that.”

“She’s just concerned about us.”

“So?” For President Pete Buttigieg’s standards at least, his tone was getting a bit uneven, although his hands were still neatly folded in his cushion-positioned lap. “I’m concerned about her, too. She’s working herself to death and won’t even make Robert, that son-of-a-gun, take Del for a weekend a month. And do you see me going on and on about that?”

“Peter -- first of all, that’s what they used to call whataboutism back in the old days. And second: you are aware of the fact that you bring up that topic everytime we vi-call her, aren’t you?”

“I don’t --” he started off, but dropped the sentence once the door creaked open. The girls were back from the bathroom.

Marisól looked exhausted. She strained under the weight of her daughter propped against her hip, fast asleep. Spindly, tan arms were hugging her neck. “Daddy,” she said, and there was a weariness in her voice that she let seldom show: “I think it’s time to go home and let Papa get the sleep he needs to heal properly.”

So it was done. When Chasten had shuffled out of the room and given the Secret Service woman a wave goodnight, he chanced one last gaze before closing the door. Peter was holding the Buddy figurine in both hands, softly stroking over it with his thumb. It was too dark in the room for Chasten to make out his expression.

***

 **The next day** **  
** **South Bend Memorial Hospital**

Joey had always needed a lot of sleep, to the point where it was a family joke -- a couple of years ago, he and Mari had given Pete a kitchen calendar with snapshots from their time at the White House for his birthday, with the twist that Joey was asleep in every single one: as a pudgy one-year old at Pete’s second inauguration; in his grandmother’s arms on Independence Day as the National Mall was awash in the purple sheen of fireworks; in a high chair while Mari tried to feed him mashed peas. 

Now, it was getting late in Vienna, where Leelah and Joey had moved after she’d been given a job as an adviser on the United Nations Refugee Agency. During their vi-call, the room behind them had darkened, until there was no sun falling through the slats of the jalousie behind them, and the electronic lighting had furtively turned their faces into ageless marble and basalt. Leelah, somehow, looked more energetic with each week she was pregnant. Joey apologized profusely with each yawn. Admittedly, Pete was not a very tactile person, but today, he really wished he could hug them. Just to make sure his hand would land on a human shoulder and not merely cut through digital mist.

Finally, Marisól had mercy on her brother and ended the call. Chasten took Russell, their old dog, off the Secret Service’s hands and on a walk down Michigan street, with Del -- who was adamant it would be a good idea to keep a dog in her mother’s New York City two-bedroom -- in tow. And Pete was alone with his daughter, who’d lingered in the plastic chair by his bedside.

“I can see you’re in discomfort, Papa. You don’t have to put on a brave face.”

She was right. In the morning, he’d taken his first steps post-op -- hoisted on a pair of crutches, his jaw clenched like it was wired shut. Really, “step” was euphemistic. Hobbles, maybe. And now, his hip and femur sent out stabbing waves of pain with each of his heartbeats. But he really didn’t have to burden her with worry. There was enough on her plate.

“Well -- it’s not like a double fracture is supposed to feel good.”

When he saw the anguish in her face, a wave of guilt surged through him, so boiling it momentarily drenched out his hipache. She sounded exasperated -- no, deeply, thoroughly exhausted. “Why don’t you request more painkillers?”

“They make me woozy. I don’t like it.”

Her lips pressed into a single, hard line. _To keep her insides from flooding out_ , he thought. She slowly nodded, once, then twice.

For a while, they sat in a silence that was not quite companionable. 

“So,” he lastly asked, and cringed at his helpless attempt at sounding unobtrusive, “anything new at the university?”

“Well -- I’m probably going to pair with a philosophy professor for a seminar on the ethics of data compilation next semester. That should be interesting. And next week, I’m at the Dean’s office.”

“Oh?”

“To discuss my track. I’m really hoping to be tenured by next year. They’re expanding the department.”

Pete smiled at her. She was wearing a ponytail instead of the usual sleek bun, and a few dark strands were standing off her forehead in a halo. It made him think of when she was a little girl who never had the patience to be sat down and have her hair combed, not an accomplished professional woman. “You know,” he answered gently, “I’m proud of you. Whether you get tenured or not. It will happen eventually -- you’re still so young …”

“So young? When you were my age, you were running for president.”

There was no real malice in her voice, only impatience. Bewilderment. Still, Pete didn’t quite know what to say. Again, she was correct. “And I might have been too young for that,” he finally mumbled. He didn’t want to sound defiant. “Also, I had your father in my corner.”

“You do know that single people can be successful, Papa, don’t you?”

A beat passed. They both averted their eyes. He chewed on his lower lip: this was a sore spot. After Robert had bailed on her and Adelina, when they were trying to pick up the pieces as a family, the one to have the teary, fuck-men, ice-cream-binging conversations had largely been Chasten. “Maybe I really should request some painkillers.” 

As soon as the nurse had left again, a fresh needle in his arm, he decided to try a second time. Be more vulnerable. He put his hand out, laid it on the mattress, palm up. His veins shimmered bluely through skin that was more paperlike the longer he looked at it. The drip-drop of the infusion was strangely calming. She sighed, and squeezed his hand with hers. 

“I’m sorry I’m such a crank today,” he began. “It’s just -- I know I’m getting old, _actually_ old, I mean, and I don’t know yet how to feel about it. It’s a weird spot to be in. I didn’t mean to be patronizing.”

She regarded him warmly for a moment. “It’s alright, Papa. You have every right to be conflicted. And I’m sorry, too. For being so snippy.” At his raised eyebrows, she chuckled and amended, “Even snippier than usual, I should say."

Their relieved laughs rang out into the room. Pete felt she was hesitating, weighing if she should tell him something, so he kept silent. Abruptly, she continued -- and indeed, her voice held a tinge of caution: “This isn’t your fault, and I don’t want to pretend it is, but it’s bugging me nonetheless, and I think it’s fair I told you.”

He was getting nervous again. “What is, dear?”

“Like I just mentioned -- it’s looking good for me at the university. The thing is: every time I get talking with the Dean and the other head honchos at the faculty, they hint -- and rather unsubtly, I might add -- at a cooperation of NYU with the Buttigieg Foundation.”

Now he saw the reason for her irritation. He winced. For almost forty years, he’d known this day would come -- and it had, in many versions; for Marisól and Joey and, to an extent, Chasten. In high school and college, in friendships and with boyfriends and girlfriends, in employment. No wonder America was filled to the brim with burgeoning political dynasties: it was almost impossible to escape the long shadow of a parent holding office. Especially if that office was the presidency. 

Marisól had seen him cringe, and hurriedly reassured him: “I know you’re not to blame. It just sucks. I just want to be a respected academic because my work is respected. Not because I happen to be the daughter of the ‘first urbanist president’. And yes, I’m quoting the Dean on that.”

At a loss for words, he let his thumb draw circles on her palm. He searched a long time for what he meant to say. 

“I just couldn’t be prouder. Of the way Del looks at you. And of your enormous, enormous breadth of intellect and academic accomplishment.” He was aware the croaky tightness in his throat showed through. “That article you wrote for ‘ _scape --_ I was just blown away. Had to look up a few terms, though.”

She blinked at him, surprised. “I didn’t know you read that.”

“I read everything you publish. Listen every time you’re on a podcast, too. Watch your lectures when they end up on the web, sometimes.”

“You do?” He was glad to catch her eyes glistening, as well. 

“Sure do,” he laughed, and wiped his cheek with the hand that was not clutching hers. “I’m sorry -- like I told you, the painkillers make me all woozy. -- Anyways: your dad pokes fun at me all the time because I tell him all about your latest project at dinner and he then has to listen to the same nerdy stuff again when you vi-call us.”

***

**Tuesday, December 24, 2059**

**South Bend**

Mari and Del on one hand and Joey and Leelah and the baby on the other were set to arrive on the same train from Chicago and would be here at six, approximately. One hour. Time to put the mulled wine on the stove and get everything ready.

Chasten was already opening his mouth to call out to Peter to get a few bottles of white from the basement when the thought occurred to him that he’d have a hard time logging them up the stairs with his cane. It was still something he was getting used to, no matter how debonair his husband looked with it. “Honey,” he shouted, instead, into the living room over the holiday playlist playing, “can you set the table for dinner?”

While he was slicing open the chestnuts, careful not to nick his finger like the last time they’d had them, Peter walked into the kitchen, a morose Russell trotting at his heels. “It really smells like Christmas in here,” he said, happy like a little child. All day, Chasten had caught him glancing at his StrapPhone -- this would only be the third time they’d get to see their new granddaughter in person. 

Chasten put aside the knife and turned toward him. “Not quite ‘chestnuts roasting on an open fire’, but it’ll do,” he laughed. “Now get to work.”

On the way out to go fetch the wine, he playfully smacked his butt. “Ow!”, said Peter in mock-outrage. “Who gave you the right?”

From halfway down the stairs, Chasten snickered: “Better change out of those grandpa pants, grandpa. Don’t give Mari any more ammunition.”

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm probably way too optimistic about the state of the world in 2059.
> 
> Thanks to zenniath for beta'ing!


End file.
